In the U.S. Pat. No. 3,864,018 of C. M. Miller, issued Feb. 4, 1975 and assigned to applicant's assignee, there is disclosed a technique for optically connecting the fibers of one group to mating fibers of a second group. The splicing hardware relies upon a thin chip with parallel evenly spaced grooves on both sides. A single fiber is received in each of the grooves. The fibers are each retained in the grooves by the base of a second chip, which rests atop the adjacent fibers. A stable array of optical fiber ends thus is produced which may be butted against a similarly assembled second end array to achieve a gang splice. This technique is disclosed in the cited Miller patent to which the reader is referred for further detail; and results in a splice with negligibly small fiber end separations and angular misalignments.
If the optical fibers being spliced should happen in a given case to vary significantly in outside diameter however, there arises the possibility of a transverse offset between the input and output fiber ends due to the fact that adjacent chips rest on the fibers. Significant transverse offset can result in excessive optical energy loss.